Archinect - News

Oliver Wainwright on Disney's 'dream or nightmare' Storyliving community

2024-04-09T11:58:00-04:00

With revenue from cinema and streaming falling in recent years, income from Disney’s “experience” division is soaring, and property development is the next logical step. Disney tried it before in Florida, first with utopian plans for Epcot (the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow), followed by the quaint town of Celebration, but Storyliving takes the branded living experience to the next level.

Writing for The Guardian, critic Oliver Wainwright reflects on plans for a major Disney-themed development at Rancho Mirage in the California desert.

As we reported initially in 2022 and in a follow-up last year, the 2,000-home Storyliving by Disney scheme will include a midcentury-influenced member's clubhouse named for the fictional Parr family from the company’s “The Incredibles” franchise, where users can engage with Disney-themed art lessons and experience dinners inspired by Disney stories.

Related on Archinect: Disney unveils further details for planned Cotino community in the Coachella Valley. Image courtesy Disney Parks

In his latest article, Wainwright views the development through the lens of the Architecture of Stage Realities exhibition taking place at Arc en Reve in Bordeaux. The exhibition "paints a portrait of Walt Disney as a natural-born developer, a cartoonist who understood not only how to lure people into his magical worlds but how to keep them coming back," Wai...

Rowan Moore wants a ‘truce’ between King Charles' traditionalists and the avant-garde

2023-05-09T12:08:00-04:00

The incurable optimist in me still wonders: could his yearnings about the built environment be more beneficially directed? Charles may have been at war with much of the architectural world for nearly 40 years, but might they not unite over what they have in common? They all want sustainable communities and good design. Architects and the monarch also have a shared enemy: the sacrifice of positive architectural qualities to housebuilders’ pursuit of profit.

Moore’s calls echo in some regard the statements made by housing secretary Michael Gove last year, in which he called for an openness to classicism given there is “no silver bullet to solve the housing crisis” domestically. Stirling Prize winners Mikhail Riches and Alison Brooks Architects are brought in as examples of those left out in the fray he created by virtue of his comments and status as an “unofficial addition” to the country's planning system.

“If he were to do anything more in the realm of architecture,” Moore writes, “it should be generous: He could praise those architects who, even if their style is not to his personal taste, dedicate energy and skill to making British towns and cities better places to live.”

Elsewhere, the Architects’ Journal reported that Norman Foster would also like a word with his new king.

'An astonishing place to explore': Oliver Wainwright previews the trippy Super Nintendo World at Universal Studios Hollywood

2023-01-25T13:00:00-05:00

Welcome to Super Nintendo World, the closest thing you can get to diving head-first inside a video game and experiencing the likely effects of swallowing one of Mario’s magic mushrooms. For Universal, it represents the first expansion beyond film- and TV-themed rides, and a step up in designing a total environment – with the opening timed to capitalise on the release of an animated Super Mario Bros movie this spring.

The park expansion officially opens on February 17th. Visitors will find attractions like the overpriced Toadstool Cafe, a “sedate crawl” signature race experience (sans shortcuts), cuter small details, and Bowser’s Castle, which apparently includes a self-help library and bomb-making workshop.

Previously on Archinect: Super Nintendo World Hollywood sets an opening date for 2023

Wainwright compared the latter to Kim Jong-Il’s palatial abode, a space he documented somewhat controversially for a 2018 investigation published by Taschen. A Universal Studios executive described its design as being geared to encourage profligate repetition, not unlike a casino's. The Hollywood location follows another that opened in Osaka in 2021 and will be joined by two others in Orlando and Singapore, due to open by the end of 2025.

Rowan Moore picks his favorite UK projects for 2022

2022-12-30T15:22:00-05:00

Playful, elegant additions to universities and colleges were the class acts to follow, while the newly opened Elizabeth line exceeded all design expectations.

Grimshaw’s long-awaited Elizabeth Line finished second (behind Grafton’s Marshall Building for the LSE). Moore said: “The Elizabeth line, when it finally opened in May, revealed an alternative universe of underground railway travel where everything is bigger, brighter and swisher. This is due to the sheer scale of the stations and to their design – unified and orderly but also curvaceous and a touch baroque.”

Notably absent were any projects by the new Soane Medal winner Peter Barber, any other social housing projects, or the Stirling Prize-winning The New Library, Magdalene College from Niall McLaughlin. The Guardian critic did say he admired Theaster Gates’ community building-inspired Serpentine Pavilion, adding that the all-black design “nicely captured shadow and light and views of surrounding greenery.”

Moshe Safdie says he 'paid a price' for antagonizing post-modernism

2022-10-31T12:22:00-04:00

“In the 70s and 80s, my ideas were ignored. I was antagonistic to postmodernism [...] and I paid a price.”

The 84-year-old Habitat 67 mastermind sat down with Rowan Moore to discuss his career and new memoir If Walls Could Speak: My Life in Architecture. Among other topics, he said he had “no idea” that his 2011 Marina Bay Sands design would become “an instant icon” and that the political situation in his native Israel brings him “great frustration” even though he believes supporters of the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanction) movement are making a “stupid mistake.”

Safdie then spoke to the chilling reception that met his post-Habitat endeavors in Puerto Rico and New York, which failed to “replicate like mushrooms” as the then 30-something architect had expected. An exhibition of Safdie’s unrealized work is conveniently on display at the Boston Architectural College’s McCormick Gallery from now through January 2nd.

Relate on Archinect: ‘More Than 50 Percent Of My Work Is Unbuilt’ says Moshe Safdie in new Time-Space-Existence video

“As an architect committed to building and impacting the e...

'Here, the architecture wins': Rowan Moore on the inside-out quality of the newly-completed Battersea Power Station

2022-10-11T09:00:00-04:00

The project as whole also creates a highly managed territory of the sort that you tend to get in single-owner developments which, despite some funky moves by a Frank Gehry-designed apartment block, is fundamentally predictable. It threatens to cage the beast that is Gilbert Scott’s masterpiece, as might the array of retail logos inside. But, between the blandscape outside and the brandscape within, the power station is cussed enough to assert its own character.

The £9 billion final boss of Greater London adaptive reuse projects (along with the Barbican) is a story of inside and out for Moore, who sees the program’s housing element as an “awkward” mismatch when compared to WilkinsonEyre’s tastefully “sober” and restrained interior retail spaces that come dotted with “outbreaks of cautious fantasy.”

View this post on Instagram A post shared by WilkinsonEyre (@wilkinsoneyre)

The Observer critic also opined that it does offer a “striking contrast” to the mixed architecture of nearby Vauxhall and Nine Elms, adding its survival can be attributed to the growing influence of heritage considerations in British planning schemes. “If only some of the thoughtfulness applied to old buildings could be applied to the planning of new ones,” he lamented, “we might be getting somewhere.”

Don't expect much from King Charles' reign architecturally, these two of his constituent critics say

2022-09-26T12:25:00-04:00

Poundbury, Paisley and Perspectives all ultimately failed to conquer the complex commercial and political challenges they faced. Their royal patron’s attempts to create human-centred townscapes have led to car-dominated suburbs. His efforts to uplift grand historic buildings have carved them into dreary flats. Our King is someone who sees the right problems but, ensconced in the very establishment that prevents meaningful solutions, he can only meddle around the edges of effecting real change.

The new British King is memorably the originator of the panned Poundbury estate that has failed to fall in line with its stated goals towards sustainability and car-free pedestrian orientation, according to Phineas Harper. He thinks the scion is hemmed in by a stolid commercial banking system and arcane land ownership laws and that class differences have otherwise made Charles' ability to gain perspective on the needs of his constituents otherwise impossible. As the Open City director sees it: “His view of society, as of architecture, is restricted to what can be seen from the tinted window of a chauffeured car.”

Previously on Archinect: Richard Rogers challenges Prince Charles to public debate over built environment

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the empire, new ArchitectureAU monthly critic Elizabeth Farrelly says she felt he “proved himself thoroughly unrepentant” during his time as Prince, citing his statements in support of traditionalism, and asking, “is he, as a constitut...

'Despair is useless': Mike Davis reflects on California, the climate crisis, life, and legacy as he faces his own mortality

2022-09-13T18:44:00-04:00

I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless.

The terminally-ill City of Quartz author sat down recently with The Guardian to discuss his waning health and look back at prescient early warnings of the state’s slow-motion social and ecological demise that has taken three decades to manifest. True to form, Davis was critical of everything: from “fascist” LA novelist Raymond Chandler to Governor Gavin Newsom’s penchant for arrogating his administration’s response to the climate crisis that has been exacerbated by even increasingly harmful and foolhardy attempts to mitigate the housing crisis in Los Angels and other non-urban areas across the state.

Related Feature Interview on Archinect: Meeting Mike Davis

“Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future,” he said. “A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan. It’s not just global warming, and drought, it’s the fact that two...

Oliver Wainwright explores the architectural history behind Saudi Arabia's planned The Line megacity

2022-09-13T09:00:00-04:00

It may now be seen as a dystopian nightmare, the far-flung folly of an autocrat desperate for global approval, but the idea of building a self-contained linear city has preoccupied the imaginations of architects and planners for generations. The Line might bill itself as a “never-before-seen approach to urbanisation”, but the principles behind it have been proposed many times over – though never successfully realised.

The Guardian critic writes that the outlandish NEOM project structure resembled a “habitable supercomputer” and cites a recent Bloomberg report that names Marvel Comics designer Olivier Pron as one of its many non-architect digital designers before pinning the massive project’s “ominous dystopian undertone” on Saudi ruler Mohammed bin Salman’s apparent penchant for cyberpunk aesthetics. “If ever there was an urban vision that embraced our end-of-days climate apocalypse,” he laments, “then this is it.”

Previously on Archinect: The Line, the largest part of Saudi Arabia’s ambitious NEOM project, looks like a total fantasy

Wainwright then turns to the architectural history books for further insights into the history of the linear megacity concept. Examples from a young Michael Graves/Peter Eisenman pairing, Superstudio, Kenzo Tange, Le Corbusier, Edgar Chambless, constructivist Mikhail Okhitovich, and 19th-century Spanish planner Arturo Soria y Mata, whom Wainwright claims invented the...

Oliver Wainwright has seen this movie before with Heatherwick’s Tree of Trees installation

2022-06-01T17:40:00-04:00

Heatherwick himself has become the puckish poster boy for the current bout of arboreal mania. He has even incorporated his trademark plant-pots-on-sticks into a range of office furniture. If in doubt, the studio mantra seems to go – just smother the design with a garnish of greenery.

The Guardian critic echoed colleague Rowan Moore's derisive critique of Heatherwick’s continued “abuse of metaphors” published in late April and added his own criticism that the 350-tree structure, just like the MVRDV-designed Marble Arch Mound, offers “yet another example of the recent fetish among certain architects and designers for conjuring a cartoonish version of nature, suspending shrubbery and balancing trees in ways that make the plants look decidedly unhappy to be there.”

Previously on Archinect: An 'abuse of metaphors': Rowan Moore on Thomas Heatherwick’s tree-inspired jubilee design (and other UK public monument debates)

Oliver Wainwright considers the impacts of Belgium’s Open Call bidding system

2022-05-03T12:17:00-04:00

Unlike the toxic culture of open international competitions, which see countless architects waste days of unpaid labour to compete in a beauty contest of novelty forms, the Open Call is focused – and paid. The democratic process has seen Pritzker prize winners drawn alongside recent graduates, unheard-of elsewhere. Unlikely as it may seem, the scheme has made this small part of northern Belgium home to some of the best new public buildings in the world.

The Guardian critic used Florian Heilmeyer’s new book, Celebrating Public Architecture: Buildings from the Open Call in Flanders 2000–2021, as a means of introduction to the system that was first enacted in 2000. Heilmeyer’s aim is to advance the notion that it “prove[s] that public architecture can actually be daring, thought-provoking, cooperative, and well-done at the same time.” Wainwright thoroughly concurred with the assertion, adding his own opinion that a shift towards a more democratic process could benefit the health and safety of his own country.

“It’s not hard to see why, given the current state of UK procurement culture,” he wrote of the controversial British way of awarding public procurements. “As the Grenfell inquiry has made all too clear in week after depressing week, the process through which public authorities procure building work has become riddled with lethal incompetence and institutionalised negligence.” Wainwright adds: “It is a process of contractual buck-...

An 'abuse of metaphors': Rowan Moore on Thomas Heatherwick’s tree-inspired jubilee design (and other UK public monument debates)

2022-05-02T16:03:00-04:00

I’ll pass by the abuse of metaphors (do milestones have hearts?) but not of trees, this being another case of certain designers’ mania for picking them up, moving them around and putting them where they don’t want to be. Those words from the studio also take liberties with the idea of art. They call the Tree of Trees a “sculpture”. Boris Johnson may once have compared Heatherwick to Michelangelo, but David it is not.

The Observer critic joined a plethora of online commentators that picked apart Heatherwick Studio’s “Tree Of Trees” Earth Day announcement by comparing it to last year’s fiasco surrounding the MVRDV-designed Marble Arch Mound, which he described as a “cartoon version of nature is placed in a London ceremonial space by people who don’t seem to have thought much about what it is that makes trees lovely.”

Moore has been critical of Heatherwick’s design inspiration in the past, referring to The Vessel designer as a “pied piper [of the] very rich” in a 2017 missive and famously citing his work as an example of the migration away from “grown-up architecture” in a 2019 piece, in which he derided cloying gimmicks that offer “at most two-liners.”

Moore also touched on the controversial (and recently-rejected) UK Holocaust Memorial proposal, laying its failure on the decision to include a learning center and stating that the government should now “take the opportunity of its verdict to apply...

The Guardian picks up on the contentious debate surrounding modernist preservation in the UK

2022-04-04T18:44:00-04:00

A trio of concerned letter writers replied to a March 31st opinion piece by The Guardian’s Owen Hatherley in which the critic declared that “hardline modern architecture is now something of a cult.”

“A living city has to strike some sort of balance between avoiding the strangulation and depopulation that happens when you conserve everything, and the visual slurry that occurs if you let developers do what they like,” Hatherley wrote. “The result has been a new tension between different notions of conservation. This is a tension that serves mainly to benefit property developers, who can make money both from new buildings, and as 'saviors' of great modern buildings at the cost of destroying their original purely social purpose, as has happened in the privatisation of London’s Keeling House or Sheffield’s Park Hill.”

The Twentieth Century Society’s London Director Catherine ...

Rowan Moore on the year that was in architecture

2021-12-30T13:00:00-05:00

What can be said of a world where one billionaire wants to build a giant tulip-shaped tower of little practical use and another wants to house thousands of students in windowless rooms in a block with all the charm of an Amazon distribution centre?

The Observer critic further continued his contrasting of Foster + Partner’s failed Tulip Tower with the Munger Hall development in California, claiming that each was the vanity project of a wayward billionaire.

“Both projects seem driven by ego, but in the wide space between the brutal functionalism of the latter and the redundant gesturing of the former, you might hope to find places where beauty is put in the service of the usual and unusual needs of human life.”

Moore also commended the push for more adaptive reuse projects in cities while recognizing the rise of mass timber as a step in the right direction. He didn’t share the same opinion, however, about biophilic design enhancements, which are increasingly perfunctory marketing gimmicks.

“The idea was to say something or other about the importance of having nature in cities, but any suspicion that these projects were, like the Tulip, a teeny bit gestural was resoundingly confirmed by the contrast between the lush landscape t...

Oliver Wainwright’s no fan of Oslo’s new Munch Museum

2021-10-26T08:36:00-04:00

The £235m mega museum of the tormented Norwegian artist stands as an ominous grey tower on the Oslo waterfront, lurching out at the top like a military lookout post, keeping watch over the fjord. It is a location scout’s dream for the ultimate villain’s headquarters, an almost comically menacing structure, bent over the pristine white iceberg of the city’s beloved opera house with a thuggish hunch.

Recently on Archinect, "estudio Herreros' Munch Museum to open in October." Photo: Adrià Goula, courtesy estudio Herreros.

The Munch Museum’s opening had been pushed back to this week following years of political holdup swelling from concerns the 11-story museum would, as Wainwright noted in his review, take away from the nearby Oslo Opera House from Snøhetta.

From corporate towers to humanitarian work, Yasmeen Lari reflects on her architectural career

2020-04-01T15:16:00-04:00

“I feel like I am atoning for some of what I did,” says Yasmeen Lari with an embarrassed chuckle. “I was a ‘starchitect’ for 36 years, but then my egotistical journey had to come to an end. It’s not only the right of the elite to have good design.”

Oliver Wainwright talks with Yasmeen Lari, who was named the 2020 Jane Drew Prize laureate earlier this year. She looks back on her architectural career, which began with designing glitzy corporate monuments and then switched to humanitarian work after the devastating 2005 Pakistan earthquake. She also shares what she's learned about disaster preparedness, how design has helped raise the status of women in Pakistan, and how she feels about winning the notable Jane Drew Prize.

Urban journalism dealt another blow as Guardian Cities ends its six-year run

2020-01-13T16:02:00-05:00

City-focused reporting has suffered another setback this week as news that the Guardian Cities initiative at The Guardian will be shuttering has been made public.

In a farewell letter published in The Guardian, Guardian Cities editor Chris Michaels writes, "Since its founding six years ago, Guardian Cities has grown from a small experiment into a huge community," adding, "We have tried to shape how the world understands urbanisation: namely, as one of the truly transformative global phenomena of the 21st century." Regarding the end of the vertical's run as a leading source of global urbanism in-depth reporting, Michaels added, "Now, however, it’s time for a change. After many years of renewed generosity from the Rockefeller Foundation, whose arms-length support meant that we retained full editorial independence in every way, Cities is closing its doors."

No specific reason was given for the end of the initiative, though online commentators were quick to point out that the end of Gu...

How can cities become "heat-proof" and how does this affect the built environment?

2019-07-02T18:57:00-04:00

On top of climate change, cities grow hotter and hotter due to an increase in urban heat island effect. According to Philip Oldfield's Guardian piece, "What would a heat-proof city look like?," there are four solutions cities can implement to decrease rising temperatures. Oldfield explains green roofs/vertical gardens, reflective roofs, water treatments (ponds, pools, misters), and dynamic shades would aide in mitigating increased temperatures. However, before understanding these solutions, it is essential to point out what causes this rising heat phenomenon.

Built environments worsen summer temperatures thanks to specific design elements and building materials. Asphalt and concrete absorb heat and bounce sun rays back onto street surfaces and surrounding areas. Tall buildings and glass skyscrapers create "urban canyons" which trap heat at ground level. Traffic and automobile dependency also contribute to heat emissions making city streets sizzling p...

The stalled refurbishment of The Palace of Westminster

2017-10-02T04:39:00-04:00

The move would raise fascinating questions about the need to replicate habits that are tied to the layout of the current chamber – voting by trooping through “aye” and “no” lobbies, for example. Archaic linguistic protocols might seem doubly peculiar when expressed in a more modern setting. People’s behaviour is shaped by their environment and it is unlikely that parliamentary culture could be unaffected by transplant to a space unlike the unique one in which it has been nurtured.

The Palace of Westminster has been in a state of advanced disrepair for many years now. Though a plan for the building's massive £3.5bn refurbishment headed by BDP was announced last year, the government has avoided taking the decision to proceed.

The main reason for the delay in action on the crumbling Palace is financial. Yet as the the Guardian notes, the spending is necessary and justified since operational facilities are crucial in ensuing "the effective functioning of the democracy" and the structure's heritage value is hard to overestimate. While traditionalists and modernists argue over restoration and the observers contemplate the impact various spaces might have on the functioning of the parliament, prompt relocation might be the best next move since the delay is only driving costs upwards.

Rowan Moore on revamping contemporary competition culture

2017-09-15T15:10:00-04:00

There are still plenty of competitions – under European Union law, some sort of competitive process is required for public buildings. A lot of the time they work well. [...] But the chances have shrunk of a Mackintosh, a Pompidou or a Golden Lane emerging, or of changing the direction of architecture. Competitions have become managerialised, encased in regulation, procedure and risk-avoidance, and varnished in PR.

Rowan Moore of The Guardian gives his two cents on the “climate of caution” that has taken over architectural competition culture in Europe, where judging panels are more inclined to pick celebrity figures over emerging practices.

How are London's Olympic grounds being used 4 years later?

2016-08-03T19:52:00-04:00

Just in time for Friday's Rio Olympics, it's time to take a look back at former Olympic villages: specifically, what good are they post-games? In London, the 560 acres of the East End that was transformed into the grounds for the 2012 Olympics have undergone the Olly Wainwright examination in his latest piece for The Guardian. As he writes,

That London has a lasting physical inheritance from its two-week £12bn jamboree is indisputable, but what kind of place is the promised Legacy-land turning out to be? So far, it’s an odd one. It is somewhere that feels more like an accidental suburban campus than a real piece of London – a place where the different functions that make up a city have been separated out, each built without much thought given to how they relate.

Good news: there is some affordable housing among the leftovers/adjacent proposed developing properties loosely branded as Olympicopolis, but there could be more (as ever).

More Olympics news:

Rio's streets clog with traffic as ...

"Hugely overwrought": Oliver Wainwright on the newly-reopened Les Halles

2016-04-06T12:31:00-04:00

Unveiled this week, the €1bn redevelopment is the largest infrastructure project that Paris has undertaken in decades, aiming to fix the messy tangle where Europe’s biggest underground station disgorges 750,000 passengers a day into a labyrinthine warren of shops [...] It is hugely overwrought, the layered steel roof pulled to and fro in tortured twists and turns, forming a contorted rollercoaster of curved trusses and angled bracing...

"The whole thing has a forlorn droop when seen from the west, as if sagging under the weight of expectation. Nor does the colour help. Ranging between sand and rancid butter depending on the light, the yellow steelwork casts a jaundiced pallor across the scene, lending the interiors a decidedly institutional air."

From marketplace to open pit to "custard-coloured flop" – more on Les Halles here:

Pyongyang's inner Wes Anderson shines through in its architecture, then and now

2015-11-03T13:24:00-05:00

'Let us turn the whole country into a socialist fairyland,'...Throughout the city, you now encounter the recurring colour schemes of salmon and teal, or pink and baby blue...These new spaces look like they have been assembled from crisp, unreal planes of colour and exude an anaesthetising aesthetic, candy-coloured decoys that distract from a reality of mass poverty across the country.

Is the Louvre Abu Dhabi Worth Celebrating?

2015-03-16T17:46:00-04:00

The Louvre Abu Dhabi looks set to open in 2016, as work on Jean Nouvel’s colossal construction speeds up and his vision of a modern medina starts to crystallise on what was once a desert island. This vast project has been stupendously controversial...Abu Dhabi’s new cultural centre is being built by exploited and abused migrant workers...Fifty years from now, when the Louvre Abu Dhabi has established itself as one of the world’s great museums, how clearly will its dark beginnings be remembered?

In Jones' op-ed, he makes a strange case, stating point blank: "Nothing excuses the inhuman working conditions that have been reported." Yet, for him, these "unexcusable" working conditions might produce nothing short of "a revolutionary subversion of the old European imperialism of knowledge." Jones asserts that the world needs a "a network of cultural oases on every continent." And, if this is accomplished, "That would vindicate the democratic educational dream of the Enlightenment, from which the first world museums grew."

I'd imagine, however, that for many of the workers currently locked into de facto slavery, art and culture are the last things they actually need. In fact, they may argue that the resources currently being applied towards the museum could instead be used to pay living wages or to provide for their basic needs. Of course, Jones' point is that these issues shouldn't be mutually exclusive, and that the merits of a museum may outweigh the conditions that brought the...

Archinect rounds up critical reactions to Koolhaas' biennale

2014-06-19T11:42:00-04:00

This year's Venice Biennale of Architecture, curated by Rem Koolhaas, officially opened on June 7, under the theme "Fundamentals". The deluge of criticism and reporting coming out of the Biennale will surely continue until it closes November 23, but so far reactions from the architectural journalism community seem pretty consistent. Critics seem at once relieved that the biennale is not given away to preening and doting upon architectural personalities, but instead focused on "architecture, not architects", as per Koolhaas' design. The flip-side of this could be seen as replacing objects of starchitectural value with a too-safe generalism, imbued with the self-importance of Koolhaas' cult of personality. Responses seem largely concerned with interpreting the man at the same time as his Biennale, rather than investigating the interplay of national pavilions' personalities under a unifying theme. But we've got many months to go, and this is only the beginning.

But with the sheer mass o...